Linotype

Went to an open day in the National Print Museum in Beggars Bush last weekend where they demonstrated various old printing presses & printing techniques.

I got them to do the letters of Tinderbox on the Linotype hot metal press, which was really interesting to watch all the intricate workings of it and amazingly fast as it takes a cast of a row of individual letters and injects molten metal into it to form the line of type, all in about 20 seconds!

Here's some photos of it that I took for a new banner for the Tinderbox blog. I was using a very tight macro lense to get a shallow depth of field as the letters are only about 4mm high.

Tinderbox banner

New banner for the Tinderbox blog using my new bag of tricks! I wanted it to have an off-register screenprint look.

There Will Be Milkshakes

Picture Show window vinyl

New post, old stuff! This is from the Tinderbox Picture Show exhibition from last year, we were going to get it professionally done & installed but they were looking to charge us an extortionate €130 for something half this size, so I did it my self with some sheets of vinyl & a pair of scissors for a total cost of €7!

Really glad I did in the end cos not only was it a fraction of the price but the handcut nature gave the letters a lot more character & quirk.

Thanks to the other Tinderboxers who helped me cut it all out and stick it up straight!

I'll Eat you Up...

This has been in my sketchbook for a while, hand drawn letters coloured in Illustrator, probably need to work on the colours a bit more.

Some Blind Alleys

I recently won a competition to design a banner and a few other buttons for Some Blind Alleys, an online journal of contemporary Irish writing and visual art. I wanted to create something clean, impactful & colourful and I wanted to keep it typographic, as the blog is the meeting point of writing and visual art, so the type becomes the image. I added the texture of paper in the background to give it a more tactile feel as if the shapes had been overprinted, allowing the colours to overlap. Simplifying the letterforms to their basic geometric shapes has been done countless times going back as far as the Bauhaus & probably even before that, and the resurgence of '80's fashion and design has seen these sort of typefaces become popular again with designers like Hort and Non-Format, so I'd been looking for an opportunity to have a go at something like this.